Free SSL sertificates from Letsencrypt

SSL sertificates have been too hard to get up and working. Addition to that, they mostly have been a bit costly.

Now there seems to be a working alternative. Letsencrypt offers an easy solution to fetch and use sertificates.

Here's an example what I did.

1. Get the scripts

git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt
cd letsencrypt

2. For getting the sertificate, you need to have either 80 or 443 port free to be used (for a moment only), this uses port 443

./letsencrypt-auto certonly --standalone -d uutispuro.fi -d www.uutispuro.fi --standalone-supported-challenges tls-sni-01

3. Add the following lines (altered to your domain of course) to your nginx conf

ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/uutispuro.fi/cert.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/uutispuro.fi/fullchain.pem;

See https://www.uutispuro.fi/en to see it in action :)

You do  need to update it periodically, every three months or so, but that is nothing else than doing the step 2. You can run it in crontab easily.